Wednesday, February 25, 2015

As Obama has vetoed the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, let us remember, as Holman Jenkins writes, that oil isn't traveling through our country. It's just doing so by a much more risky method than a pipeline.

It’s better to be lucky than good. President Obama, who arrived promising to heal the planet and halt the rising seas, instead presided over a fossil-fuel renaissance in America. If you were unemployed and found a decent job in Obama’s economy, there’s a good chance it was a fracking job. If things are finally looking up for the middle class, cheap gas is a major contributor.

He was lucky again on July 6, 2013. Thanks to various competing news stories (a plane crash in San Francisco, the Trayvon Martin shooting trial), Americans did not dwell on a fiery oil-train accident in Canada that killed 47. For if there’s one boom Mr. Obama can claim authorship of, it’s the oil-by-rail boom.

A business that barely existed when he took office now moves an impressive million barrels a day. The oil pouring forth from America’s resurgent fields, after all, has to reach market somehow. And as the Journal explained in December, political opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline has “emboldened resistance to at least 10 other pipeline projects across North America. . . . The groups coordinate their moves in regular conference calls and at meetings in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.”

The publication Energy Monitor Worldwide elaborated in September: “Environmentalists and governments are making it more and more difficult to get approval to build pipelines, so producers are increasingly using rail to get their oil to refineries for processing into products that the American public needs. . . . If all the railcars carrying crude oil on a single day were hitched together to a single locomotive, that train would be about 17 miles long.”

....as we are reminded every few weeks, trains will still derail, oil will spill, and messes will have to be cleaned up.

Which raises a question: What are Mr. Obama’s true policy convictions, if any?

After the midterm elections, we might have expected him to try to tempt the new Republican majority with a tax-reform deal in return for a carbon tax. Even if the effort didn’t bear immediate fruit, the way would be pointed toward a long-term bargain to restore growth while addressing climate-change fears.

We also would have expected him finally to wave through the Keystone pipeline, if only out of irritation with green allies for tormenting him over a phony symbolic issue.

Wrong on both counts. Polls show the public supports the pipeline; labor wants the jobs. But for Mr. Obama, the balancing factor is clearly the criticism he would receive from the Sierra Club, the hostile tweets that might be directed at him from millennials, and the money that a handful of green billionaires might redirect to the Clinton Foundation rather than Mr. Obama’s own post-presidential occupations.

What seems absent from his calculations are any practical considerations outside the political bubble, such as the millions of barrels of flammable liquid that will be rumbling through America’s residential neighborhoods aboard mile-long oil trains.

So no one should believe that Obama vetoed the Keystone pipeline out of true concern for the environment. He said he vetoed the bill out of respect for the procedural process. As if the man who ignored the procedural process in taking action to allow illegal immigrants to stay here and to allow extensions on Obamacare to avoid deadlines explicitly written into the law really cares about following correct procedure.

It isn’t just Keystone. The Left is working to block every piece of energy infrastructure of any consequence everywhere in the country, in the hopes that doing so will hobble the oil and gas industries and usher in a new age in which the American economy runs on solar panels and happy thoughts. (Never mind that solar panels are made out of polyester, meaning made out of oil, just as wind turbine blades are made from oil, etc.) In New York, Governor Cuomo has banned modern techniques of gas extraction categorically, while environmentalists are working to regulate into nonexistence the rail infrastructure used to transport oil where pipelines are not available. Others in New York are working to strangle the oil-shipping facilities at the port in Albany.

On the other side of the country, environmental activists are working to block the expansion of marine and rail facilities that enable the export of coal to foreign markets. The Sierra Club has been laboring mightily to block U.S. natural-gas exports to foreign markets.

There are two ways of looking at the fossil-fuel business: One is that the extraction, processing, and consumption of fossil fuels entails both risks and environmental costs, which have to be responsibly managed. The other is: Fossil fuels are evil, and the extraction, processing, and consumption of them must be stopped by any means necessary. That used to be a debate in the environmentalist movement, but it isn’t really a debate any more: The lunatics won. And the lunatics write a great many very large checks to Democrats, and therefore must be accommodated.

Jay Cost examines whether Jeb Bush has any appeal outside the professional political class. Cost, author of two excellent historical analyses on American power, sees a parallel to the election of 1880.

This points to Jeb’s big challenge. He might be able to attract his own version of the “Immortal 306,” corralling a sizeable portion of the GOP’s professional class, but as Grant’s experience in 1880 illustrates, that is not enough. One has to make a broader offer to the party. In 1880, Grant failed to do that. The logic of a Grant restoration made little sense that year -- at least to those who did not draw a living from politics. Hence, he never made it past those core supporters. The country, and for that matter much of the Republican party, had moved on. So Grant lost.

Jeb certainly looks to be cornering the market on the modern variety of professional Republicans, but he too will have to do more. What is the case for a Bush restoration, beyond the fact that it would make the professional GOP comfortable once again? Why should average Republican primary voters -- the insurance salesmen and truck drivers, not pollsters and policy advisors -- choose Jeb over Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, or the dozen other potential nominees? Jeb will have to make a very persuasive argument on this front. He will face tougher competition than his brother did in 2000. Indeed, 2016 could see the most competitive GOP primary since 1980.

As Grant’s experience in 1880 demonstrates, winning over the insiders and professionals is simply not enough. The Immortal 306 may stay with you the whole way, but they are never a majority of the party. Can Jeb expand beyond them? It remains to be seen.

Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald is admitting he erred in claiming during a conversation with a homeless veteran that he served in the U.S. military's special forces.

McDonald's claim came in a January exchange with the veteran, who said he'd served in special forces, that was captured by CBS News cameras for a story on the VA's effort to find housing for homeless veterans.

"Special forces? What years? I was in special forces!" McDonald told the man.

McDonald completed Army Ranger training, but was never assigned to a Ranger battalion, serving instead in the 82nd Airborne Division.

When The Huffington Post contacted McDonald about the claim, he acknowledged that what he'd said "is not right. I was not in special forces. What I said was wrong."

McDonald also admitted he misled the veteran in a statement issued Monday.

"While I was in Los Angeles, engaging a homeless individual to determine his Veteran status, I asked the man where he had served in the military. He responded that he had served in special forces. I incorrectly stated that I had been in special forces," McDonald said in the statement. "That was inaccurate and I apologize to anyone that was offended by my misstatement."

He said he was trying to "connect" with that veteran. McDonald did serve honorably in the 82nd Airborne in the 1970s and did graduate from Ranger School although he never served in a Ranger battalion. Why exaggerate his service? How can he serve to help veterans if he's been exposed as puffing up his resume?

Now he tells us. It is only now that David Axelrod tells us that he never thought all that well of John Edwards even as he was working on Edwards' 2004 campaign.

John Hinderaker wonders why government funding of environmental research should be any less suspect than private funding. It's not as if the government doesn't have a predetermined interest in certain results being found.

This is the point I really want to make: the New York Times and other pro-government sources assume that government funding of research is lily-white, while corporate funding is inherently suspect. This is ridiculous. Put aside, for a moment, the fact that the American environmental movement is funded by Russia’s state-controlled oil company. Also the fact that Greenpeace gets money ($203 million) from the American Petroleum Foundation, with another $214 million coming from the Chamber of Commerce.

That isn’t the real scandal. The real scandal is that the overwhelming majority of money spent on climate research comes from governments. Governments, most notably ours, fund climate hysteria to the tune of billions of dollars per year. Why? Because the whole point of global warming alarmism is to persuade voters to cede more control over Western economies to government. (No one actually cares about CO2 emissions from India or China, which together vastly exceed ours.)

Governments fund climate research–but only climate research that feeds alarmism–because they are the main parties in interest in the climate debate. Governments stand to gain trillions of dollars in revenue and unprecedented power if voters in the U.S. and other Western countries can be stampeded into ceding more power to them, based on transparently bad science.

The green-space citizens will lose. The trauma-center advocates and everyone injured seriously on the South Side will lose. There are more important issues at stake here, like stealing property from public coffers on the orders of a strong-arming mayor who used to work for the president whose library foundation is ostentatiously waffling about its decision to come to Chicago so as to extract as much as it can from the citizens of his former city in service to his legacy.

If their goal was to accurately reflect the legacy of this president, they’ve already done it beautifully.

His use of a gun to kill a rabid dog would make him inhumane to the animal rights PACs.

His belief in considering other opinions would make him “Flip-Flop Finch.”

And his association with the shadowy Boo Radley would trigger questions about his own character. I can imagine the grainy footage of Boo, the foreboding piano music, the narrator’s voice exhorting us to “Call Atticus Finch. Because we deserve the truth!”

This is classless. Rand Paul's chief political adviser has been soliciting donations from conservatives and political insiders, some connected to Rand Paul's RAND PAC, to help pay the expenses for he and his wife to adopt a child.

7 comments:

No, Obama never promised to heal the planet and halt the rising seas. That was just a clever line by Romney, a guy who believes that climate change is real but had to lie to get the votes of the "Climate change is a fraud" nutjobs.

"...then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth..." Barack Obama 04JUN2008

Wrong about what, Paul? That Romney lied about climate change to appease the deniers. In 2010, he wrote that human activity was a "contributing factor" in climate change.

Obama promised to tackle the issues, he did not promise to heal the planet or "halt the rising seas."

Perhaps you also believe that Pelosi called Hamas a humanitarian organization, that a rapist/pedophile is serving in the Senate, and that Obama is a gay, commie, marxist. Those were all claims made and supported here (silence=complicity, right).

There is no "Climate Change", as described the the "Warmists",...the climate is constantly in flux and will get colder or warmer based on myriad known and unknown factors...Romney never lied...as to your other comments, I have no opinion...I deal in fact.

Paul,You don't deal in opinion? Were you the same Paul who, a few days ago, posted that Obama was the worst president ever? I hope you realize that that is an opinion, and not a fact, no matter how strongly feel about it.

Claiming that Pelosi called Hamas a humanitarian organization is neither fact nor opinion. It is a lie started by Fox (I believe) and spread by conservative sites, including here. Calling someone a rapist or pedophile is not an opinion. It is a charge that deserves to be backed-up, or withdrawn. The person who made the charge (who absurdly claims to be currently working in military-intelligence) hasn't had the courage to do either one. Some of the most disgraceful, cowardly and un-American comments and accusations have been written here lately about people being commies, marxists, sexual predators, etc. Not one conservative has had the integrity to try to curb it. I doubt there is anyone here who has an ounce of pride.

Come on Mark. You are lying. Obama said exactly what you claim he didn't. But, I;; bet you still believe Palin said "You can see Alaska from my house".

Second, surely you are aware that we now have proof the climate data has been altered to show warming in Peru when there was decline. This goes all the back to Michael Mann and his "fix" to show warming when there was none.

Now, we have demonstrable errors in the Climate models that never worked in the first place.

Please do not insult our intelligence with your global warming religion. It is religion and myth, no science.

Rick,Do you understand what the verb "to begin" means? Hint: It does not mean "to solve", "to halt" nor "to heal". I realize that you don't approve of his actions, but he has initiated (big word for you, I know) policies that will, in the opinion of many, help to slow and reverse the the harm being done to our planet.

You call that a lie, and yet write that O'Reilly didn't lie about claiming to be in the Falklands:

"I was in a situation one time, in a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands, where my photographer got run down and then hit his head and was bleeding from the ear on the concrete.

Your statement that climate change is a myth and religion is just plain sad.